COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE BAUHAUS AND J.J.

SCHOOL OF
ARCHITECTURE
NITYA BALI
3
RD
YEAR-B, 24

The paper examines the differences and similarities between the two respective art and architectural
colleges of modernism: The Bauhaus School of art and architecture and J.J. School of art and
architecture.
IDEOLOGIES BEHIND THE SCHOOLS:
THE BAUHAUS SCHOOL:
Gropius was influenced by the old Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th which had
emerged as a response to the intense industrialization of Victorian England. Beginning in the mid-19th
century, reformers led by the English designer William Morris had sought to bridge the same division by
emphasizing high-quality handicrafts in combination with design appropriate to its purpose. By the last
decade of that century, these efforts had led to the Arts and Crafts Movement. While extending the Arts
and Crafts attentiveness to good design for every aspect of daily living, the forward-looking
Bauhaus rejected the Arts and Crafts emphasis on individually executed luxury objects. Realizing that
machine production had to be the precondition of design if that effort was to have any impact in the
20th century, Gropius directed the schools design efforts toward mass manufacture. On the example of
Gropius ideal, modern designers have since thought in terms of producing functional and aesthetically
pleasing objects for mass society rather than individual items for wealthy elite.
Its aim had been to bring artists and craftspeople together to ensure the survival of
beautiful craftsmanship in the face of mechanized labour.

Gropius aim was to unite artists and craftspeople in order to embrace technological developments. It
was clear that technology was the future and machines now provided opportunities to mass-produce
products for everyday use. With this vision of unity, the Bauhaus aimed to create an environment in
which artists could work alongside architects and designers to contribute to the building of the future
using this new machine technology.
J.J.SCHOOL OF ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE:

The Sir JJ School of Art was set up in 1857 as the Bombay School of Art & Industry, thanks to the vision
and munificence of Sir Jamshetjee Jeejeebhoy.
An essentially self made man; having experienced the miseries of poverty in early life; he developed
great sympathy for his poorer countrymen; and in his later life was occupied with alleviating human
distress in all forms. After looking at the success of Indian art wares in London by serving for the great
exhibition of 1851 and also by getting persuaded by the local press which urged him to give him a lead in
the improvement of Indian taste, he envisaged an institution for the improvement of arts and
manufacturers (and) the habits of industry of middle and lower classes. He felt that under proper
guidance people of india would attain a degreeof proficiency in painting and sculpture which would lead
to an extended taste for such objects and would enable India once more to take up an advanced
position among manufacturing countries of the world.

In the second half of the 19th century, architectural learning was integrated with an art education that
followed the Beaux Arts School of sculptural ornament and architectural detailing.
George Wittet was a Scottish architect who being from the British empire under whom we find the
development of the Indo- Saracenic architecture in colonial India his major works being in Bombay.
BRIEF INTRODUCTION ON BOTH THE SCHOOLS ARCHITECTURE:
BAHAUS SCHOOL OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE:
As an architect, Gropius believed that a building should be at the centre of the teaching of all the arts,
hence the name Bauhaus (House of Building) and in 1925 the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau
and into a new purpose-built home which reflected the core Bauhaus values.
In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house
the school. This building contained many features that later became hallmarks of modernist
architecture, including steel-frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel
plan, throughout which Gropius distributed studio, classroom, and administrative space for maximum
efficiency and spatial logic.
Dessau, an aspiring industrial city in central Germany, was chosen by the Bauhaus Masters
over Frankf urt am Main, for example, depended in part on the fact that it could offer the Bauhaus a
new school building. Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus in 1919 and its director until 1928,
designed the building on behalf of the city of Dessau and in cooperation with Carl Fieger, Er nst
Neuf ert and others in his private architectural practice the Bauhaus did not have its own
department of architecture until 1927. The Bauhaus workshops were integrated within the buildings
interior design. The city of Dessau provided money for the new school building on a development site
close to the train station and also for the Masters' Houses, and remained the owner of both properties.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919 by architect, Walter Gropius with the aim
of bridging the gap between art, design and industry and unifying all three. It was a school where
students received theoretical and practical training in all of the fine arts -ceramics, murals, stained glass,
typography, metalwork, book binding, stone sculpture and furniture-making and learned to combine
these fine art skills with new technologies to design and manufacture products that were both beautiful
and practical.
In his design, Wal t er Gropi us refined architectonic ideas he first put into practice before WW I in
the construction of the Fagus-Werke in Alfeld an der Leine. In Dessau as in Alfeld, the glass curtain
wall suspended in front of the load-bearing framework defines the exterior of the workshop wing and
openly shows the constructive elements. Gropius, rather than visually amplifying the corners of the
cubic body of the building, allowed the glass surface to overlap the edges, thereby creating the
impression of lightness.
Gropius consistently separated the parts of the Bauhaus building according to their functions and
designed each differently. He thereby arranged the different wings asymmetrically in relation to what
is today the Bauhausstrae and the Gropiusallee respectively.
The glazed, three-storey workshop wing, the block for the vocational school (also three storey high) with
its unostentatious rows of windows, and the five-storey studio building with its conspicuous, projecting
balconies are the main elements of the complex. A two-storey bridge which housed, e.g., the
administration department and, until 1928, Gropiuss architectural practice, connects the workshop
wing with the vocational school. A single-storey building with a hall, stage and refectory, t he so-
cal l ed Fest i ve Ar ea, connects the workshop wing to the studio building. The latter originally
featured 28 studio flats for students and junior masters, each measuring 20 m. The ingenious design of
the portals between the foyer and the hall and a folding partition between the stage and the refectory,
along with the ceiling design and color design, impart a grandiose spatial coalescence to the sequence of
foyer-hall-stage-refectory, shaping the so-called Festive Area. The faade of the students dormitory is
distinguished in the east by individual balconies and in the south by long balconies that continue around
the corner of the building.
The entire complex is rendered and painted mainly in light tones, creating an attractive contrast to the
window frames, which are dark. For the interior, the junior master of the mural workshop, Hinnerk
Scheper, designed a detailed color plan that, by differentiating between supporting and masking
elements through the use of color, aimed to accentuate the construction of the building.
The pinwheel configuration when viewed from the air represents in form the propellers of the airplanes
manufactured in the Dessau area. This complex embodies various technological and design oriented
advancements including a pet chance for glazing, the creation of an architecture of transparency with
the supporting structure rising behind the facing skin. It was a radical structure populated by progressive
minds touting a unique group-oriented approach to learning.
The technical construction of the building... is demonstrated by the latest technological development of
the time: a skeleton of reinforced concrete with brickwork, mushroom-shaped ceilings on the lower
level, and roofs covered with asphalt tile that can be walked upon.
The continuous horizontal casement is subdivided by thin steel mullions, characteristic of the New
Architecture. And as a direct result of the growing preponderance of voids over solids, glass is assuming
an ever greater structural importance. (http://www.abstract-art-framed.com/bauhaus.html)



BAUHAUS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE (source: httpwww.designishistory.com1920the-bauhaus)

J.J. SCHOOL OF ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE:
J.J school of Arts and Architecture in Mumbai (Bombay) is one of the older institutions and was
originated in 1857. This arts school was named after Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy, a philanthropist, who
financed for the formation of this institution. The class for drawing began on March 2, 1857 at the
Elphinstone institution.

In 1866, the management of the school was taken over by the Government of India. Later in 1878 the
school moved to the current building from the Elphinstone institution. This building was erected in the
Gothic style of architecture.
The Sir JJ College of Architecture was initially built to cater to the demand for Bombay Pottery, a style of
ceramics invented by Wilkins Terry, who founded the JJ School of Art's pottery department. The
popularity of these pots soon declined but the Victorian Neo-Gothic building, designed by architect
George Wittet, took on a new avatar as India's first college of architecture. The building is c shaped. The
more inclusive use of concrete, a new material that would house Indias masses.
(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/100-years-of-constructing-history/articleshow/23599606.cms)


J.J.SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE (source: http://www.sirjjarchitecture.org/history.html )
COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS:
Both the schools belonging to the same period started with a similar ideology of enhancing the
relationship between art, architecture and industry. Both were an outcome of a continuous effort to
reform applied art education in India and Germany.

BUILDING:
BAHAUS SCHOOL:
It consists of three connected wings or bridges. School and workshop are connected through a two-story
bridge, which spans the approach road from Dessau. The administration was located on the lower level
of the bridge, and on the upper level was the private office of the two architects, Walter Gropius and
Adolf Meyer, which could be compared to the ship captain's 'command bridge' due to its location. The
dormitories and the school building are connected through a wing where the assembly hall and the
dining room are located, with a stage between.
J.J. SCHOOL:
It has three separate institutions within the campus: oldest one being the J.J School of Arts (1857),
followed by J.J. School of Architecture (1913), J.J. School of Applied Arts (1958).

Where one hand both schools had similar sectors (i.e. arts, architecture and applied arts) but both
held apart in terms of development of the three courses in time. The Bauhaus School which from its
origin itself had all the three sectors amalgamated with each other. But what we see in the case of J.J.
School is three stage development of the campus in which first came up the arts school followed by
architecture and applied arts in different time periods.
Also the buildings are separate in case of J.J. School with the school of arts and applied arts being in
neo-gothic style and the school of architecture in Edwardian baroque style by George Wittet. Whereas
in the case of Bauhaus school the three sectors are integrated in a single building where there is no
central focus on any part and each and every space is unique.
What we find in common between the two is shifting of the location of the schools in course of time.
The J.J School held its initial classes at Elphinstone institution from where it shifted to Jamsetjees old
residence at Abdul Rehman street and then to the current building of grey stone in Bombay.
The Bauhaus too was based in Weimar until 1925, Dessau through 1932, and Berlin in its final months.
Both Bombay and Dessau being industrial towns were chosen as the sites for the respective schools
and the schools were built with financial aid from the city people in both the scenarios.

The idea of endowing an art school in a period, in which an institution of such nature was unheard of,
was in itself a remarkable one. Though in both the schools the ideologies and style was challenged
from start to the end, still what we find is both the respective schools emerging in their respective
time periods as leading centres of academic art and as noteworthy learning centres till date.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1999. [book auth.] b.m.sankhdher. education system on the eve of world war 1,1914. s.l. : deep and
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Bauhaus- New World Encyclopedia-imp.htm. [Online]
Bauhaus-Walter Gropius-Great Buildings Architecture.htm. [Online]
Company, Massachusetts: Charles T. Branford. 1955. Walter Gropius. The New Architecture and the
Bauhaus . boston : s.n., 1955. NA680.G7 1955..
http://www.sirjjarchitecture.org/. http://www.sirjjarchitecture.org/. [Online]
Lecture at the Sir jj College Mumbai.htm. [Online]
2008. sir jamsetjee jejeebhoy school of art. [book auth.] Bakhtiar dadabhoy. sugar in milk- lives of
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